Monday, August 15, 2016

Deadly supernovas

Richard Cowper’s 1974 science fiction novel The Twilight of
Briareus is one of the weirdest alien invasion stories I’ve read. It made a big
impression on me as a teenager, and the central idea of the book is still very
strong (although when I re-read it recently its storytelling hadn’t stood the
test of time). The Briareus of the story is a star 130 light years from Earth
that goes supernova. When the wavefront finally hits our planet it causes
immediate climatic events, including storms and tornadoes that lash the British
coastline, and the slow onset of a mini ice age. But that’s only the visible
effects. Soon it’s discovered that the entire human race is now sterile, and
certain people – including children conceived at the time of the Briareus event
– have telepathic abilities. One scientist begins to suspect that alien
entities have used the supernova to take over humanity…

It struck me on first reading as a very ‘left field’
concept, so it was interesting to read the latest studies about an actual event
that occurred in our galactic neighbourhood during human pre-history. Two
supernovae exploded several hundred light years from Earth about two million
years ago, leaving radioactive traces that can still be detected on the ocean
floor and the surface of the Moon. It’s been theorised that both these events
could have affected the development of homo erectus, who was busy descending
from the trees at the time.

Certainly the increase in ambient light – the supernovae
would have been as bright as the Moon for at least a year – would have affected
the behaviour of animals that take such cues to navigate or mate or lay their
eggs; and we can only wonder what our ancestors made of it, perhaps inventing
stories of sky gods and titanic battles in the heavens. Luckily the wave of
radiation that followed – approximately five hundred years later – was
relatively weak, raising background radioactivity to only three times what it
is today. That’s a small amount, likely to increase the risk of cancer, for
example, by only three per cent.

So we dodged a bullet two million years ago. And in case
you’re wondering, the risk of another nearby supernova happening today is less
than one in several billion.

This article originally appeared in Beyond, my free newsletter for lovers of science and science fiction. Sign up here - http://eepurl.com/btvru1

Mailing List Pop-Up

SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks